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As the warm and personable owners of Svedjekojan, Caisa and Ulf and their 65 beautiful and enthusiastic sled dogs are your guides to fulfilling this snowy adventure that is on so many bucket lists.

There is something magical and exhilarating when going out into the untamed forest with a team of well-trained huskies. The combination of cold air, soft snow and enchanting setting orchestrate a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This is the frosty dream of so many adventurers!

For over a decade, Caisa and Ulf Ohlsson have been making this dream come true in beautiful Swedish Lapland. Centrally located, Svedjekojan is just 45 minutes from Luleå and 25 minutes from the port town of Piteå. The farmstead has an idyllic setting, picturesquely situated next to a lake and in the midst of the forest.

From the moment you arrive, you know you have arrived to somewhere special. A huge, Sami-styled teepee dominates the landscape. Guests are first welcomed into the enormous, wooden structure. The huge picture windows give a 360-degree view of the gorgeous and frosty landscape.

Inside this magnificent building, in the centre of the room, there is a huge fire pit with a roaring fire. Guests are greeted with a warm cup of current juice and invited to sit at the rustic wooden tables and chairs around the cosy fire. Here, the charismatic Ulf and Caisa introduce themselves and begin to educate the guests about the simple basics of diving the sled dogs.

As Caisa walks down and individually greets each dog, she embraces them and she describes each of their strengths and special personalities

Many guests will go out with their own sledge, with one person sitting and the another person driving the sledge dog team. They will stop at the halfway point and switch spots. For those new to sledge dog driving, Caisa and Ulf will accompany them on a small run around the nearby lake, first starting out slow and soon, building up to a higher speed and heading out into the forest. After years of working with sled dogs, Caisa explains that participants always surprise themselves at how easy dogsledding really is! Even the timidest are quickly convinced that they can indeed do this on their own.

Visiting the dogs is a treat in itself. After learning how to drive the dog sledge, guests are invited to go down to the vast area where the sledges are set up and where the dogs reside. As soon as you enter the long row of spacious dog kennels and the individual enclosed areas, the dogs start to get excited and begin to bark incessantly, hoping that it is time to get out and start to run!

Caisa breeds Alaskan Huskies. The colouring of the gorgeous dogs is brown, grey, white or a combination of these colours, on their double-thick coats. Their eyes are blue or brown-or one of each! They are so friendly, happy and affectionate. With their tongues out and tails wagging, they are the epitome of joy. Most of all, Caisa emphasises, they are well loved and cared for.

There is a deep and affectionate connection between the dogs and their owners – and the guests!

As she walks down and individually greets each dog, she embraces them and she describes each of their strengths and special personalities. From a young age, to even just a few weeks old, Caisa can spot which dogs are going to be good lead dogs. She explains that the good lead dogs are those who respond to her and will listen and obey every single thing she says. She will work with these dogs and train them intensively. “Other dogs”, she explains, ‘are like motors.’ They are just strong and want to run all of the time. Most of all, all of her dogs are kind and have a very good life at Svedjekojan.

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While the sledge dogs are so vocal and excited to go out and run, but once they begin to set up the sledges, they become silent and go into work mode. These are working dogs and they want to run!

The biggest surprise is always the incredible speed in which the dogs run. When you ride in the forest you feel the speed, yet when you are in the open with nothing but snow surrounding you, everything feels like you are in slow motion. Out here, the speed is often at 20km per hour! And the dogs love to run! When they sense they are on a longer route, they actually start to run even faster.

Caisa and Ulf in the wooden teepee at Svedjekojan.

Learn more
Svedjekojan husky farm is located in the village Tranutrask, nearby both cities Luleå and Piteå. They offer dogsledding tours over ice covered lakes and through dense forests, either sitting in a sled or driving your own! Find out more by visiting svedjekojan.se.

While Caisa trains and breeds the dogs, Ulf is in charge of the outdoor work, including the almost zen-like process of determining and making the dog sled tracks. Ulf could not state in words the definitive conditions for making tracks but he relies more on his intuition and years and years of experience. After he examines the snow, he will check the temperature during the day and then the temperature during the night. After this analysis, he senses the right time to go out into the forest and make the tracks, which more often than not, is in the middle of the night.

The dog sledding season begins at the end of December and lasts until mid-April. Afterwards, Ulf and Caisa will take tours out to the mountains, near the Norwegian border and this can last even into May. While the winter is dramatic with the 20 hours of darkness and the frequent Northern Lights, the spring is also wonderful, with the warmer weather and the light.

In addition, they offer food and will cook local sourced, Swedish Lapland cuisine over the open fire. The most traditional food is Suovas, the smoked reindeer meat, with potatoes and onion and a little bit of pork, accompanied with lingonberries from the nearby forest.

Brändön Lodge and Pine Bay Lodge are genuine, small-scale establishments by the sea in the Gulf of Bothnia. Cousins Göran Widén and Johan Björklund have run them for nearly 20 years. Together with their co-workers, who all live in villages around Brändön, they welcome clients and let them experience the Arctic lifestyle with ice as the main theme.

Dog sledding through vast expanses of white is in many ways synonymous with a winter adventure in Swedish Lapland. Håkan Stenlund took a tour with the company Erlebnis Wildnis in the Vindelfjällen Nature Reserve. Following the footsteps of Jack London, in a way.

What does a husky do in the months before the snow falls? Well, just the same as a hockey player before the season. Snow-free exercise. And if you're really lucky you can go along to a training session.